It’s Never About the Cheese: Victoria Cantemir & Carlos Garcia on Love, Money, and a Life Built Across Borders

Love and money make a complicated pairing. Add a border — and a country that isn’t the one you grew up in — and the conversation gets harder still.

In this episode, Mickelle sits down with Victoria Cantemir and Carlos Garcia of Amsterdam Financial Coaching: a married couple who help international partners get on the same page about money, as a team. Victoria left Moldova for Amsterdam sixteen years ago, earned her degree in economics and finance, and spent more than a decade doing everything by the book — saving and investing half of what she made. And still, she never felt like she’d arrived.

What she discovered on the other side of that feeling became their work. Money is never really about money. It’s about values, and whether two people are quietly building toward the same life — or slowly, without noticing, building toward different ones.

This is a conversation about the small arguments that aren’t small at all, the goals that drift apart when no one’s watching, and why a plan — even an imperfect one — is what makes a life abroad feel like it’s yours.

In this episode

• Why “it’s never about money” — and what every argument is really about. The price of cheese, the wilted lettuce thrown out — the small scuffles that sound comical and are never actually about groceries. Underneath sits a clash of values, and that’s the real conversation.
• The three layers couples move through, from daily friction to the bigger questions. First, clearing the day-to-day money noise. Then learning to look forward instead of reviewing the budget they missed. Then the big, strategic questions — financial independence, a first home — that tend to get set aside.
• Avoider and chaser: the dynamic nearly every couple quietly plays out. One partner books the session; the other comes along, polite but holding back. The shift Victoria and Carlos live for is watching the quieter one lean in — and start to enjoy it.
• How goals fall out of alignment the further ahead you look. Partners write their 12-month, three-year, and longer-term goals separately. The near-term ones almost always match. The further out you go, the more they diverge — even for couples married ten years or more.
• Building a shared plan when you don’t know how long you’ll stay. Moving abroad resets everything — goals, timelines, the rules you thought you knew. Any plan, even a rough one you iterate on together, beats the quiet drift of survival mode.
• The couples therapy behind the coaching — practicing on themselves first. Before marrying, the two went to therapy themselves, surfacing old money stories — including Carlos’s family losing their home during the financial crisis — so they could coach from lived experience, not theory.

About the guests

Victoria Cantemir grew up in Moldova and moved to Amsterdam sixteen years ago. She earned a degree in economics and finance and spent more than a decade climbing the corporate ladder, saving and investing half of everything she made — and still feeling like it was never quite enough. That realization, that a healthy balance sheet isn’t the same as a life that feels rich, led her to financial coaching: a profession well established in the US, far less so in Europe.

Carlos Garcia is Venezuelan, raised in the US and shaped by years in Spain before settling in Amsterdam. He brings long-range strategic thinking and an investor’s eye to the partnership. After Victoria coached their first client couple on her own, she asked him to join “to balance the energies in the room.” It stuck.

Together they run Amsterdam Financial Coaching, working with individuals and couples — especially internationals — to clear the day-to-day money friction, align their values, and build toward a shared financial goal. Their approach sits deliberately between advice and therapy: holistic strategy first, with specialists (tax, mortgage, pensions) brought in for the pinpoint questions.

Find them here:

• Website: amsterdamfinancialcoaching.com — their services, and real stories from the couples they’ve worked with
• Instagram: @amsterdamfinancialcoaching — a daily tip, a new idea, or a different way of thinking about love and money

Next steps

Press play on the money talk.

If you’ve ever felt that quiet gap between you and your partner — the one that shows up over cheese and is really about something much bigger — this is a warm place to start. Then keep the conversation going inside House of Peregrine, the network for international life, made by and for people living abroad. Because a richer life abroad rarely starts with a bigger number. It starts with the talk.